


This is how you remind me (of what I really am)

by jodiejareau



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:48:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25242688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jodiejareau/pseuds/jodiejareau
Summary: I have talked a man on the edge down from blowing up a building. I have shot dangerous criminals through glass walls, through moving cars, bullets hitting targets over considerable distance. I have kept secrets that put both mine and other peoples’ lives in danger, and secrets that have saved lives. I’ve done difficult things before, but not like this. I have spoken a secret I thought I’d take with me to my grave, and now, now I can’t look my best friend in the eye.
Relationships: Jennifer "JJ" Jareau & Emily Prentiss, Jennifer "JJ" Jareau/Spencer Reid, Jennifer "JJ" Jareau/William LaMontagne Jr.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 29





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place post-Truth or Dare (14x15), pre-15x1.

I have talked a man on the edge down from blowing up a building. I have shot dangerous criminals through glass walls, through moving cars, bullets hitting targets over considerable distance. I have kept secrets that put both mine and other peoples’ lives in danger, and secrets that have saved lives. I’ve done difficult things before, but not like this. I have spoken a secret I thought I’d take with me to my grave, and now, now I can’t look my best friend in the eye.

I want to say it wasn’t true, that it’s just another time I’ve beaten Spencer in a game of poker – that I knew exactly what to say and how to say it to make it sound convincing. Who the fuck dies in a game of truth or dare with an unsub? Not me and not him, not if I could help it. It would’ve been the logical thing to do in that situation: come up with a secret that you’d be afraid to speak aloud in a certain situation, deliver it tears in your eyes, voice a bit shaky. I probably could have fooled him, but here’s the thing: I didn’t fabricate a secret. I didn’t need to, because I already had one, and it’s stupid, really, that I let it slip. That guy didn’t know me, didn’t know us, didn’t have a clue how many stitches I was ripping open, how many relationships I was risking by telling Spencer how I felt. I could’ve made anything up, but I didn’t, and now I’m here.

For a group of profilers, nobody in the BAU is very perceptive outside of a case. There’s been an atmosphere an inch thick between the two of us since what happened, but nobody seems to have noticed that we’re not joking around like we usually do. I’m on edge every time he looks at me, lost in my thoughts (or mostly just the one thought – “what the FUCK did I do” – on repeat). You’d think it would be hard for us not to profile each other. If I were more naïve I’d say it’s trust or respect, but really I think it’s just fatigue. People tell you what they want you to know and sometimes you just have to accept that. It’s hard in our line of work not to push, but eventually, once you’ve ruined enough connections with your subtle probing, you realise that it’s counterintuitive, that nobody ever bought the confidence of a friend through constant analysis. That said, there’s one person who has always been able to see through all of my smoke and mirrors, and I’m avoiding her.

Everyone has left the office but I’m sat here staring into space, fingers running over old scars. I used to be really good at hating myself for the things I’d done wrong, carving out my mental pain on my body and punishing myself in any number of ways. Sometimes it isn’t as far behind me as I’d like to think. I walk to the kitchen and make myself a coffee, wrapping my hands around the searing hot mug and suppressing a wince. My phone beeps and I know without looking that it’s Will. Will. I wanted so badly to be a LaMontagne. That’s not why I married him, though. I loved him, I love him, but it’s different. He’s the guy I’d ride off into the sunset with in a sedan, windows rolled down and kids strapped into safety seats. Will rolls his eyes good-naturedly when I spend more money on shoes than is sensible, he leaves parties early if he can tell I’m not comfortable, he stays up with me all night after a bad case while I tell him the details that are imprinted on my eyelids whenever I close them. Will is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

I didn’t want to be this person. I’ve worked so hard to curate this image of who I am, this reputation, this exterior, that sometimes I forget who I am underneath it.

It was an accident. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but it’s unforgivable because it’s not like I didn’t have my chance, way before Will was on the scene. We were young and I was figuring some stuff out – figuring myself out – and kissing girls I met in bars was more my scene than dating my co-worker and blowing my career up. That’s literally the number one rule, right? – don’t get involved with your co-workers. I wish now that I had. Back then I had nothing to lose but my freedom. Maybe we’d have gone on three dates and realised we were better as friends, maybe we’d have been together a couple of years and just… fallen apart. Maybe we’d still be together: the team would have come to our wedding, my kids would be his and we’d live in a nice house in some gardened utopia in the suburbs. Either way it’d be out of my system. I want to know things about him that I have no right to know, married or otherwise. I wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, make myself sick in the bathroom downstairs so that I don’t wake Will or the kids, go for runs in the dark at 3am to try and outrun my thoughts, but it doesn’t work. I don’t know when this happened. It’s true what I said – I have loved him forever, but not always like this. At some point things changed.

I wouldn’t act on it. I can’t act on it. I won’t. But then isn’t confession a sort of action, really? I don’t know. I should have kept my mouth shut and got shot.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She doesn’t say anything, because she doesn’t have to, and that’s why I’ve been avoiding exactly this situation. We’re like two halves of the same coin: Will is my husband, but Emily Prentiss is my soulmate, and she always, always knows.

“You okay in there?”

My heart stops dead for a couple of seconds. The BAU office is pretty reliably dead after hours unless we have an open case, and then it’s anything but - even when the rest of us are on location, Penelope is rarely left alone: she’ll be sequestered in her office with her monitors and bobble-head pens and various minions of the FBI high-ups running in and out, asking whether she’s considered this angle or checked out that connection. It didn’t used to be that way, but now they like to keep an eye on us. Strauss was bad enough, but her most recent replacement is even worse.

I turn, wondering how I didn’t know Emily was still here. “What are you doing here?” She’s leaning against the door to my old office, coat slung over her shoulder and bag in hand. I check my watch - gone midnight.

“Answering a question with a question. Some would call that evasive.” Emily raises a perfectly-shaped eyebrow at me. “May I?”

I nod, and she places her bag by the door, coming to sit next to me on the floor, backs against the wall. I spent so many long nights in this office when I started out in the BAU. I’d once told Elle Greenaway once that my office door was always open because I was never in there, and that was true of the daytime hours, but for a long time I slept in that office. I’d stay later than the others, promising to catch them for a drink at the bar once I’d read one more file, adjusted my priority list one more time, weighed one more lost life against another to see which case held the most potential for lives saved and crises averted.  _ One more file.  _ Then it would be 1am, and I’d think about the walk to my car in the dark and the countless women whose mortuary photos had crossed my desk who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time and I’d think,  _ just one more file.  _ I haven’t spent a night in here for years, but I always come back here in the end.

We’re side by side, but I can tell she’s looking at the way I’m digging my fingernails into the pads of my fingertips. I feel her gaze drop to the old scars on my arms, and I feel her wonder whether there are any new ones hidden underneath the fabric of today’s tailored suit. She doesn’t say anything, because she doesn’t have to, and that’s why I’ve been avoiding exactly this situation. We’re like two halves of the same coin: Will is my husband, but Emily Prentiss is my soulmate, and she always, always knows.

“I fucked up, Em,” I tell her, manicured fingernail tracing the nail of my thumb.

She reaches for my hand - “tell me” - and I laugh because that’s the last thing I want to do, but here I am, spending my night in an old office packed with the files of monsters instead of facing my husband, and doesn’t that make me the monster?

But I do, I tell her that I needed to tell an unsub a convincing lie to save both our necks and I didn’t, that I don’t know when I started fantasising about Spencer when Will is inside me, that I find myself wondering how the fuck I got myself into this mess when I have everything I ever wanted. I’ve stared down the barrel of so many loaded guns and I’ve never come undone like that. I tell her I’m fine and I don’t realise I’m crying until she squeezes my hand tighter.

“We can’t help who we fall for, JJ,” she tells me, and while I know she’s right about that, I also know that that doesn’t absolve me of a goddamn thing. “You did what you had to do, and if you hadn’t, neither of you would be here.”

“But I didn’t have to tell the  _ truth,  _ Em!” I’m almost shouting, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry with myself. “He didn’t know me, or us, he didn’t know  _ anything,  _ why didn’t I just make something up-”

“You were scared,” Emily says, managing to sound reassuring and authoritative at the same time. “You thought he was going to kill you, or Spence, or the hostage.”

“Right, but I know how to lie -”

“JJ,” she shakes her head, “you thought you were going to  _ die _ . He’d just told you that it was your last chance, for God’s sake, he had a  _ gun pointed at you. _ I think you need to cut yourself some slack.”

“I ruined our friendship,” I say, my voice cracking somewhere in the middle.

“Spencer’s a grown-up, and so are you. He understands.”

“How can he understand?!” I pull my hands back and push my hair out of my face, drag my hand through my hair. “I’m married, Em. There was  _ no reason  _ for me to ever tell him. I can’t act on it, nothing can come from it - things can’t change and now they can’t stay the same, either.”

“It’s not ideal,” she agrees, turning to face me and crossing her legs. “It’s hard, to have that relationship with someone knowing you could have had more at some point, but it’s not impossible.”

I narrow my eyes at her. “It’s not?”

“You need to give it time, Jayj,” she looks at me sympathetically. “It’s been what, two weeks? Ten days?” I nod, and she continues, “Of course things are still weird, but that doesn’t mean they will be forever. You’ve known how you feel for a long time, but Spencer only just found out. He needs time to process that, and you need to give yourself a break.”

She’s making sense, and I want to believe that she’s right, so I nod, pull my cuffs down over my wrists.

“I would’ve done the same, Jayj,” she tells me, and I look up. Her dark eyes are intense even in this dim light as she holds my gaze. “It wasn’t selfish to tell the truth to save both of your lives.”

I shuffle back next to her, feel my breathing even out a little as I lean my head on her shoulder, feel her lean her head on mine. “Thank you,” I whisper, because the dark doesn’t feel quite so overwhelming with her beside me.


End file.
